Is a New Jim Crow Emerging in India? Ashutosh Varshney Gives a Warning

That's the point here. It's not there yet. But if electorally the BJP keeps winning, this is a prospect that must be faced.

Ashutosh Varshney

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A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com.

Ashutosh Varshney is the Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Brown University. He is the author of many books and papers on India and its politics. His most recent article (coauthored with Connor Staggs), published in Journal of Democracy, is "Hindu Nationalism and the New Jim Crow."

Key Highlights

• Introduction - 1:31
• Hindu Nationalism - 3:48
• Jim Crow and India - 12:08
• Vigilantism - 23:53
• Solutions - 34:46

Key Links

"Hindu Nationalism and the New Jim Crow" by Ashutosh Varshney and Connor Staggs in Journal of Democracy

"India’s Democracy at 70: Growth, Inequality, and Nationalism" by Ashutosh Varshney in Journal of Democracy

Follow Ashutosh Varshney on X @ProfVarshney

Democracy Paradox Podcast

Ashutosh Varshney on India. Democracy in Hard Places

Is India Still a Democracy? Rahul Verma Emphatically Says Yes

More Episodes from the Podcast

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Apes of the State created all Music

Email the show at jkempf@democracyparadox.com

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Transcript

Jim Crow is among the most disturbing legacies of the United States. It segregated Americans on the basis of race and used the law alongside social norms to impose an extreme form of social control upon the black population. What makes Jim Crow challenging to comprehend is it represents an illiberal authoritarian method of governance within otherwise democratic institutions and traditions. It’s easier for us to imagine authoritarianism under a dictatorship. It’s harder to explain how it happens in a republic.

Ashutosh Varshney warns India is on the verge of repeating the same mistakes America made during this period. He recently cowrote a paper with Connor Staggs called “Hindu Nationalism and the New Jim Crow.” It is in the new edition of the Journal of Democracy that just came out today. Ashutosh is the Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Brown University. He has written widely about politics in India and warned about the rise of Hindu Nationalism.

Our conversation discusses the parallels between Jim Crow in the American South and recent events in parts of India. We also discuss how those parallels diverge and what might be done to reverse them.

Now I want to introduce the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, as a sponsor of the podcast. The Kellogg Institute was founded by Guillermo O’Donnell, one of the giants of democratic thought, more than 40 years ago. It continues to sponsor research on democracy and human development. Check them out at Kellogg.nd.edu. You’ll find a link in the show notes to their website. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor of the podcast, please send me an email to jkempf@democracyparadox.com. But for now… This is my conversation with Ashutosh Varshney…

jmk

Ashutosh Varshney, welcome back to the Democracy Paradox.

Ashutosh Varshney

Wonderful to be with you again, Justin.

jmk

Well, Ashu, I really loved this article. It's called “Hindu Nationalism and the New Jim Crow.” It just came out today in the new issue of the Journal of Democracy. It's one of those articles that really makes me start to think through what is happening in India and also the entire idea and mindset behind this ideology of Hindu nationalism. I mean, it's very difficult to be able to get into the mindset of the politics that's happening in a country like India that's so distant from my own. So, why don't we start there with the idea of Hindu nationalism? How has it really changed the political divides and the political cleavages that exist within India in the past, I don't know, 10 years since Modi's come to power?

Ashutosh Varshney

I'm so glad you liked the article, Justin. I've been thinking about this comparison for some time and wrote a column three years ago. It was read quite widely and the response was such that I started working on it with my PhD students. So, it's a coauthored piece, as you know, with Conor Staggs. Hindu nationalism is summarizable in the following manner. India is a Hindu nation. The Hindus are the original peoples of India and Muslims in particular, the largest minority, are descendants of invaders who came from the Middle East and Central Asia and became rulers for quite a few centuries. Independent India after 1947 should have restored the primacy of Hindus and not given Hindus and Muslims political, legal, and constitutional equality.

The original peoples of the land, according to this argument, had to have ownership of the nation and had to be given a superior bundle of rights and privileges. Muslims were given equality and that was especially wrong in their view because a Muslim homeland was created in 1947 in the form of Pakistan out of British India. The British ruled from 1757 to 1947 for nearly 200 years. From British India emerged two nations, Pakistan and India. Hindu nationalists believe that India should have been primarily Hindu just as Pakistan became a Muslim homeland.

So, the freedom fighters of India and the constitution makers fundamentally disagreed with this idea and claimed that those Muslims who stayed back in India - roughly one third stayed back in India and two thirds became citizens of Pakistan - would not be punished for the formation of Pakistan. They would have the same rights as citizens of India, as the Hindus or any other community of India. This the Hindu nationalists have always objected to. In the early years of independence, very explicitly, they didn't accept the Indian constitution. In the last 10 years or so, it's not that they now reject the Indian constitution, but it should be fundamentally revised.

jmk

So, I get the impression that Hindu nationalism is not a new ideology. It's been around just as long as the Indian state. In fact, it's been around longer. It predates Indian independence. But I get the impression that early debates, the early conflicts within India did not center around these questions of identity. It existed, but it feels like it was more of a peripheral issue up until recently. Am I getting that wrong? Did something actually change in India that Hindu nationalism took center stage or has it always been there at the forefront of Indian politics since its beginning?

Ashutosh Varshney

First of all, it's true to say that it predates Indian independence. The first explicit formulation is in the 1920s. It was born as an ideology, even if the feelings had been there in certain sections of society. However, it could never take over the independence movement or could not become the guiding ideology of the independence movement. So, even with the movement for a separate Muslim homeland which became Pakistan, its fight was with the Congress Party, which wanted a united India and an India not cleaved on or divided on religious lines. A multi-religious India was its main fight. The argument of the Muslim League, which led the movement for a Muslim homeland, was that the Congress Party's commitment to religious equality was basically a fig leaf.

In the end, it is a Hindu majority party even though the ideology of the Congress Party was about religious equality and a multireligious India. Some Hindu nationalists were part of the Congress Party it has to be said, but they were never able to take over or redesign the fundamental ideology of the Congress Party, which was committed to religious equality and to a multi-religious India. They worked within that.

But the notion of Hindu nationalism, that Muslims are fundamentally disloyal to India, that their loyalty belongs to the Middle East, where their religion came from and they couldn't be true Indians even if they were born in India, unlike the Hindus who are both born in India and their religion came from India, this particular argument that Muslims were fundamentally disloyal to India was never a major part of even those politicians within Congress party who had pro-Hindu inclinations. So, Hindu nationalist parties in the first two, three decades, roughly first two decades of Indian independence, were quite peripheral and the state at that time, under the first prime minister of India and under the Congress Party, fought any Hindu nationalist tendencies that either emerged within the party or any attempts by Hindu nationalists to cleave society on religious lines.

So, they were working on an idea and building on an idea of a multi-religious India that became a state project, not simply a political party project under the first prime minister of India. It is the opposite today. The state project is not about a multi-religious India. The state project under Mr. Modi, who came to power 10 years ago, roughly 10 years ago, is about restoring Hindu primacy. It's a very different kind of state project. So, Hindu nationalism as an ideology was always there. You can't deny it was not there, but it didn't govern the state and it couldn't take over the ideology of the freedom movement. It remained somewhere in the periphery trying to enter the center, trying to enter the mainstream, but not succeeding.

jmk

So, the key point to the article, the key parallel that you're trying to draw, is that you see connections between the idea of Hindu supremacy in India today and white supremacy at the time of Jim Crow between the 1880s up through the 1950s into the 1960s. That you see the way that they were treating people that they considered to be outside the political community in India it is Muslims. In the American South it was black Americans. I find that this parallel has multiple layers that we can get into, a lot of different ways to be able to think about it. For starters, this idea of Hindu supremacy cuts against the old concepts of caste that existed within India - the idea that any caste seems to be part of the Hindu nation.

So, in some ways, it's progressive in terms of saying that anyone who is a Hindu can be part of this Hindu nation, but only as long as they're able to cast Muslims as an other. It reminds me a lot of what happened in the American South where the slaveholders kind of were a cast that was set apart and then after the end of slavery, they united with poor white farmers that were previously not really part of the same society, but were able to create a sense of white supremacy that no matter how much income you had you were part of that same white race. You were part of that same group. I’d like to be able to kind of get your thoughts in terms of how these two different ideas of Hindu supremacy and white supremacy. What parallels do you see between those two?

Ashutosh Varshney

So, the ideology of Hindu nationalism seeks to embrace all castes within the Hindu religion regardless of how poor or how lowly ranked they were. So, your comparison of the rich white aristocracy that held slaves and the poor white farmers attempt to come together is quite parallel to the Hindu upper caste who actually are the most dominant part of Hindu nationalism and certainly the mother organization, the RSS… Mr. Modi himself is not an upper caste Hindu, he's a middle caste Hindu. But the idea is that the various castes of Hinduism were all unequal traditionally. Let's divide them into three parts: the upper caste, the middle caste, the lowest caste, which included the untouchables then and ex-untouchables today.

So, in many ways, you could say that the lowest Hindu caste, what are called Dalits today and were called Untouchables earlier, should be the right parallel to the black community. You could say something like that. However, Hindu nationalists seek to bring them under the Hindu umbrella and keep Muslims in particular out. The idea that poor white farmers are brought under the white umbrella, the larger white umbrella in the American South ten or so years after slavery ended and the so called, what in political science, in my discipline, would be called counterrevolution or reaction, what they called redemption, mind you. The new governments that came to power after 1876 in the South, many of them were simply called redeemers. What are they redeeming? What is this redemption about? This is redemption of white supremacy and white honor.

The poor white farmers would be brought under this umbrella and the blacks would be cast out on the famous argument that it's whites who settled this country and blacks did not settle this country. Blacks cannot be equal to whites. Muslims cannot be equal to Hindus. Muslims are not the original peoples of India. In this case, blacks are not who settled this country. Whites settled this country. So, white primacy must be restored. That is redemption. This is why I say white supremacy and Hindu supremacy are ideological twins.

jmk

The other parallel I notice is that while Hindu nationalists claim that it's an all caste movement, that anyone of any caste is equal to one another, it doesn't always behave that way. Caste still exists. There still is caste prejudice, just like in the United States, even though white supremacy might have made the case that all whites were equal, class certainly existed within the American South and within the greater United States as well. Class didn't just disappear. People didn't start treating people all as equals. There was still clearly class prejudice within the United States even during the era of Jim Crow and even to this day. So, even though they're trying to make a movement that says that all Hindus are equal and they're opposed only to this one group, those old prejudices haven't disappeared either at the same time.

Ashutosh Varshney

That is correct, fundamentally correct. In the older form of Hindu nationalism, upper caste privileges were explicitly recognized and the argument was that the older caste system is intrinsic to Hinduism and Hindu society and should be maintained. That argument does not explicitly exist anymore. However, it is true that many Dalits would claim, and many middle castes would claim, that upper caste condescension towards them is beyond doubt.

Just the fact that more than 70 percent upper caste voted for BJP, but the middle castes were less than 50 percent in BJP's favor, and the lowest castes, the Dalits, were only a third in favor of BJP in the 2019 elections, is the electoral expression of the same idea that not all Dalits feel that they are treated equally, not all middle castes feel they're treated equally, and there is no doubt the upper castes feel that this is their party.

jmk

Now, it's pretty controversial to say that a Jim Crow, a new Jim Crow, is emerging in any other country. I mean, we're talking about extremely punitive laws that were put in place in the American South. Ones that were highly exclusionary. It was effectively an apartheid system within the American South that predated apartheid within South Africa. So, help us understand what those laws are that are repressing Muslims within India. How is it that you see this as being something that is as repressive as Jim Crow was in the American South.

Ashutosh Varshney

It's not there yet, but some steps have been taken in that direction. One, India's only Muslim majority state had some special privileges constitutionally given and that was based on historical circumstances. One of the first things that BJP did after being reelected in 2019 with a larger vote and more seats in parliament was to push through the abrogation of the constitutional provision that gave India's only Muslim majority state special status. So, a state of India called Kashmir, its statehood was taken away and it became a union territory directly ruled by Delhi.

Secondly, ordinances and laws in some states which prohibit Hindu Muslim marriage, even if the two adults would freely like to enter a marital relationship. These are called anti-love jihad ordinances and laws. The claim here is that young Muslim men attract young Hindu women and this process, if not stopped, would lead to Hindus becoming a minority in India even though it's clear That Muslims today are 14 percent of India and Hindus are close to 80 percent of India.

So, to bring the Hindu proportion down to less than 50 percent is virtually impossible. These sets of laws and ordinances show the first legal moves, just as some of the first legal moves in the American South after 1876 were beginning to emerge and achieved their ideological and legal maturity by 1910 or so. That's the point here. It's not there yet. But if electorally the BJP keeps winning, this is a prospect that must be faced.

jmk

The disenfranchisement efforts sound a lot like the American South as well, because the American South never said that black Americans were not allowed to vote. They instituted poll taxes that they were able to use the law to disenfranchise people that they wanted to disenfranchise. They used literacy tests that they would apply differently upon black Americans than they did among poor white Americans. Again, it's another example where you can use the law differently upon different groups. You can still claim that it's not about race. It's not about religion, while at the same time, it really is all about race and religion.

Ashutosh Varshney

You're fundamentally right. So, how did the American Southern states do it? They used legal methods to overcome constitutional requirements. They didn't say Blacks were being disenfranchised. That's absolutely correct. They used literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise them. So, 90 percent of Blacks, the data shows within the first few years of the so-called emancipatory period after the end of Civil War, had registered to vote and the data also shows that by 1910 that proportion was down to 5, 4, 3% basically, because literacy tests and poll taxes effectively disenfranchised them. Meanwhile, the poor whites who were disenfranchised were brought back in through Grandfather Clauses.

Now, in India's case, they're not administering poll taxes or administering literacy tests, they're using citizenship laws. Those will be aimed at disenfranchisement. You are not going to send 200 million Muslims back to Bangladesh and Pakistan. The purpose can only be disenfranchisement through a citizenship method, not by saying that Muslims cannot vote. Those Muslims who have the papers and can prove it will vote just as 5 percent of Blacks continued to vote, even in 1910. The strategy is roughly the same, though in terms of exactitude, it's not the same. It's not literally the same, but politically it's the same.

jmk

The other similarity that I saw in your paper and that you kind of touched on just a moment ago when you brought up the love jihad laws was that the violations on civil rights only go so far in terms of the law that's written down on paper. It's combined with a loosening of the entire idea of the rule of law by allowing vigilantism to be able to actually enforce the rules that exist almost more as a social code than as a legal code.

So, while you have love jihad laws on the books, they don't get enforced necessarily in the court of law as often as they sometimes get enforced on the street where people can decide whether or not somebody has broken that standard where they have actually forced a Hindu girl to be married off. They decide it on the streets so that they don't have to actually prove it in a court. They use lynchings just as they did in the American South and again, they're using their own prejudices, they're using rule of force rather than the rule of law to be able to implement some of these standards and codes and some of these repressive efforts against the Muslim population.

Ashutosh Varshney

Yes, that's also fundamentally correct because Jim Crow was not only a legal system, it was also an extralegal system. Vigilantism was quite popular among the white community. These were public spectacles and local officials participated in that. Postcards were made of lynchings and circulated widely. It's also true that data shows that the largest number of lynchings was most probably related to violations of social sexual codes. It was not about white men violating those codes to attract or to develop intimacy with black women. No. It was about black men forbidden from developing intimacy with white women. It's the same in India. It's Muslim men and Hindu women. It's not Hindu men and Muslim women. The extralegal side of it is also similar.

Lynchings were not very common in India earlier. Riots were common. Riots are defined as a clash between two mobs where the state may have expressed prejudice in one direction or the other, but doesn't abandon the principle of neutrality. In the case of lynching, the principle is abandoned. Local officials, the cops, look the other way or sometimes support the lynchers. That is different from riots. So, lynchings actually come closer to pogroms. States support one group over the other. That's why lynchings become common. Vigilantes are not allowed to do this unless they're assured that they will escape punishment. That's happening in India. The scale is different. The scale is not the same as in the American South. The scale of American Southern lynchings are quite astronomical. That's not where India has reached, but lynchings have reached a point where they have sufficiently terrorized the Muslim population.

I might add that something even worse has started happening to show the partiality, the rampant partiality of the state. Muslim homes and businesses have been bulldozed in some BJP states. The argument always is that they didn't allow a Hindu procession to go through or that their homes and businesses have been made on pieces of land that are not legally theirs. It's not only the Muslims who have this problem. This is also a problem with a lot of Hindus whose houses and businesses are made on pieces of land that are not legally their own. But they're not targeted for bulldozing. The bulldozing is done against Muslim homes and Muslim businesses. So, the blind partiality of the state is strikingly evident in BJP states.

jmk

I think it's important to recognize that vigilantism like this does not happen in the absence of the state. The state is not only aware of it, but is actively encouraging these behaviors. It is happening in the absence of law. They are not enforcing the laws that would say that the lynching of a person is illegal. I mean, it literally is a murder. The assault of Muslims would be illegal according to the law. But the authorities are not only ignoring it, but oftentimes actively encouraging it so that they don't have to go through the judicial system. Part of the reason why they don't want to go through the judicial system is sometimes these lynchings are not happening because a person actually broke a law, no matter how unjust the law might be.

Oftentimes it's happening as an attempt to be able to steal their property, to be able to take something away from other people. It's an attempt to take political power away from groups. It's an attempt to take property away from groups. Oftentimes, the motivations behind vigilantism aren't about what they claim to be on the surface. It's about something as crude as just that we want to take what is theirs because we think it should be ours. Again, that's another reason why it's happening in the absence of law, because it would be difficult to impossible to be able to make that happen in the presence of fair and impartial legal system.

Ashutosh Varshney

That's correct. That's correct. You'll have to show in a court of law what law was broken. That rarely happens in these cases. It rarely happened in America. Conor and I investigated this. We found one particular case in Virginia where a group of lynchers, I think four of them or three of them, were jailed. The lynchers basically went scot-free. The policies of Jim Crow lasted nearly a century in the United States and to some extent, the effects are still felt to this day in different ways.

jmk

You've mentioned that the process is in the early phases in India. How can you reverse this trend? Do you see daylight? Is there an effort to be able to fight against it? Is there any backlash that you see that's happening that could mean that India has a different direction to go than the United States did after the end of reconstruction?

Ashutosh Varshney

So, in India's case, the formation of these laws and the rise of lynching, both the legal and extralegal side, is basically 10 years old. Of course, the hope is that it won't last as long as Jim Crow did in the United States, almost nine decades. Some would argue that the judiciary can take on executives and legislatures which pass laws or pass decrees or ordinances, which violate the constitutional clauses of equality and its promise of equality to citizens and its promise of rule-based order and rule-based governance. But the judiciary failed in the United States. It's only in the 1950s that it started reacting to the legal excesses of Jim Crow. By 1965, with the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act, the legal game was over.

Now, in India's case, whether the judiciary will do it remains unclear. As of now, we can't be very optimistic about that. The main counter will come from electoral politics if non-BJP parties start winning - not simply half of the states, which they still have in control, but also power in the center, power in Delhi. One of the luckier things in this comparison for America was that Washington never came fully under the control of Jim Crow. It was states. Now, in India, BJP controls the center. The powers given to the states are not as strongly anchored in the constitution as in the United States. Delhi is stronger than Washington in terms of its relationship with the states. Therefore, not just winning states, but non-BJP parties have to figure out how to win power in Delhi. That will be the biggest check.

If BJP keeps winning Delhi, then one cannot be very optimistic about what's coming. States can resist and they will, but their powers are not as great. The third issue beyond the judiciary and the election system is movement politics. So, after CAA was passed, there were protests all over India, especially led by Muslims. But not only Muslims, many Hindus also participated in that. Can protests be allowed in Hindu nationalist India? Will they be banned? That is a political struggle too. Can something like a civil rights movement that emerged in the United States in the fifties, can something like that emerge on behalf of Muslims? That's very hard to predict and may not. The current government has cracked down on civil society organizations and non-state organizations in a very heavy-handed manner.

So, the possibilities of protest through civil society organizations have not disappeared entirely, but have come down severely. Fourth is whether international opinion will have an impact. The point is, why would international opinion get involved in this, especially if India is strategically becoming more and more important? If American foreign policy concentrates on China as adversary number one and India can be used against China in the foreign policy discourse and foreign policy strategy, then many of India's undemocratic features will be ignored. In American foreign policy, whenever there's a clash between the strategic needs and human rights, often the strategic needs have won out. That has often happened and some might argue always happened.

jmk

So, the parallel we've been making is really about the diagnosis. We see a parallel between what is happening within India today in terms of Hindu supremacy and the rise of Jim Crow in the American South. But maybe the parallel in terms of the solution is different. The United States had something very similar where it was the more illiberal power that actually did have control in Washington during the antebellum period before the Civil War. People talked about the slave holding powers actually controlling American politics at the federal level. One of the reasons why they had control was because the opposition party didn't have a consistent message that really rebutted the slave holding South. It was the Whig party and it was very fragmented in terms of what their purpose was and in terms of what their mission.

What ended up happening was is that they needed to realign the political parties and the Republican Party had to emerge to be able to contest the Democrats. Is it possible that in India, one of the problems is the INC hasn't historically been the best political party to rebut the BJP in terms of these arguments and maybe what needs to happen is a political realignment within India? That they need to be able to come up with some new political parties that can emerge to be able to unite these different arguments into something that's very consistent that can really contest the BJP on the federal level. I mean, is what really needs to happen in India is a new political vision to be able to contest the BJP long term?

Ashutosh Varshney

So, the fundamental point you're making is correct. The INC, the Congress party, has tried to organize a new alliance. Opposition parties typically are strong at the state level. Many of them rule various states. The Congress party rules only three right now and is in alliance in a fourth, so that's what it is. But another 10 or 11 states are with so called regional parties. They're trying to come together to fight the BJP and trying to come up with another, what might be called, grand narrative about what the threat of the BJP is and how it is against the so-called idea of India, which was promoted by the constitution: multi-religious, religious equality. I think the most likely path out for them is not to fight on Hindu-Muslim issues because as of now, it's very unclear that will generate a great deal of support.

What they can fight on is to revive the caste argument that Hindu nationalism is not about justice to the lower castes, so, what you call poor farmers, a poor white community. That takes the form in India of lower castes. So, whether or not you fight on behalf of the poor and you think it's not a very sensible strategy, you can certainly fight on behalf of the lower castes and bring Muslims in that way. So, an alliance of lower caste and Muslims has been tried out in several states of India and it has worked in those states of India. The question is can it work at the national level? But most probably, at least for the next elections, the fight will be around reorganizing lower castes and saying that they have not received justice, equal treatment. They are not equal participants in the seats of power.

So, Mr. Modi has been very, very strategically clever about this. A number of important positions have been given to the lower caste politicians. Now, not enough, you could argue. If you could do the numbers, then it's clear that upper castes have a very high proportion of the seats of power. But he has allocated some very visible positions to lower caste politicians and presented that as an idea that Hindu nationalism is not only about upper caste dominance and he himself is not an upper caste politician. So, the Indian version of the fight would be very different and some of these things have started happening. The coalition is formally born. That coalition formally exists - Congress parties with regional parties which are ruling different parts of India. That does exist. Can it win?

In the end, BJP has 38 percent of India's vote, not 50 percent of India's vote. It has 50 percent of the Hindu vote, roughly, but 38 percent of India's overall vote. In a first past the post system, 38 percent have generated close to 60 percent seats for them. So, the question is, how do you reorganize? How do you penetrate the remaining 62 percent and turn the remaining 62 percent into an electoral bloc, into seats in Parliament? That's the challenge that non-BJP parties face today. Let's see what happens. As of now, the BJP is the front runner for the next election.

jmk

The question in the back of my mind is always going to be whether the Gandhis and the INC are the best vehicle to be able to make that case. I think that's always going to be the challenge. In the United States, they found that the Whig party was not the right vehicle to make that case. It literally had to collapse and create an entirely new political party to be able to rise up and actually challenge that. Of course, the American case is problematic because it resulted in a civil war.

That's not what we want to see happen in India, but it does raise the question of whether there needs to be a complete rethinking of the politics within the country and a complete reordering in terms of the institutions, the political parties, to be able to make that happen. I think that's an even more complicated conversation to be able to have.

Ashutosh Varshney

The opinion is divided on the Gandhi's. It is. However, the idea of an entirely new party emerging has been there for some time, but has not acquired national clout and the notion that an alliance of parties, different parties, important in different states in alliance with the INC would be a more effective way to challenge the BJP than an entirely new political party, that argument has much greater mileage in India's political space. For this particular idea, idea of alliance, to lose its relevance, the alliance will have to do so badly electorally that it loses legitimacy altogether. Then you think about whether a single political party or two, three political parties together can re-envision, can re-engineer their strategies as a way to fight.

jmk

Ashu, thank you so much for joining me today. I want to plug the article one more time. Again, it's co-written with Conor Staggs, Hindu Nationalism and the New Jim Crow. Thank you so much for writing the article. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Ashutosh Varshney

Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to talk to you and discuss the parallels between the American South and Hindu nationalism today.